A reader named Matt responds to my Omar Barghouti post of yesterday and raises the issues of one-state and the right of return. To be journalistic about it, these issues have often divided the Palestinian solidarity movement. Medea Benjamin and Naomi Klein have both stated that they are agnostic about one state or two states. And meantime, Norman Finkelstein dropped out of the Free Gaza march recently over right of return language, which he opposes. On the other hand, the group Jews Against the Occupation specifically coalesced around support for the right of return. I gather that Palestinians are not so divided about the right. And yes, Matt is right in saying that this site has largely avoided tackling the question. I publish his letters to stir debate and help people think.
I was at the Barghouti/Fletcher "debate" and it went essentially how Barghouti described it in your interview. Fletcher was a last minute replacement for what I can only assume was a more astute and well-equipped defender of Israel and Zionism. It was as if, in a last ditch effort to fill the slot, the organizers had shepherded any random Jew from the pews of a nearby synagogue and forced him to debate Omar Barghouti. He had absolutely no frame of reference and it was an embarrassing spectacle.
But the real reason I’m writing is to mention something that you may already know but didn’t include in your piece on BDS/Barghouti, which is that the BDS movement, officially, is a one-state movement. This may have been obvious to you. It wasn’t to me, until the debate the other night (and I had seen Barghouti speak at Israeli Apartheid Week events on several occasions). I approached Barghouti afterwards and asked him, "If Israel and the PLO were to somehow negotiate a two-state agreement that, as per the Clinton Parameters, forwent the full implementation of the Palestinian right of return in exchange for a token acknowledgement of Palestinian suffering and financial compensation for the refugees, what would become of the BDS movement?" His reply was that BDS would reject the agreement absolutely. The fight for the refugees’ return and the full democratization of Israel would continue, Palestinian state or no.
And here is a subject I rarely see discussed on your blog. Where do you guys stand on the right of return? Human, political, and national rights for every human being are an absolute, universal imperative–this is indisputable. But where does the right of a refugee to return to the land from which he/she was uprooted 60 years ago fall into this scheme, if the human, political and national rights just mentioned can be satisfied in a different way? If the Palestinians languishing in refugee camps can be resettled, with the help of international aid, in a settler-free West Bank, under the sovereign control of a representative government, then what moral basis remains for the kind of struggle BDS/Barghouti envisions? If the two-state solution is totally defunct, as it may in fact be, then a protracted (and sure-to-be-horrifically-bloody) civil rights struggle is the only remaining option. But if its not defunct, then what basis do we have for supporting a movement that rejects absolutely anything short of the full return of the refugees? I cannot tell if this is what you yourself endorse, and if so, I would like to be convinced.
But as it stands, I cannot grasp the reasoning by which, of the millions of refugees created in the great wars and decolonizations of the 20th century, most of whom never returned to their homes, the Palestinian refugees are uniquely deserving of this right–a right seemingly in excess of the universal human rights to self-determination that everyone deserves. This is my sole remaining internal conflict vis-a-vis Israel/Palestine.
Weiss notes that he has generally said that Palestinians are the ones to extinguish that right, if they choose to, not Americans; also that emerging international law post WW2, and the United Nations, upheld the Palestinians’ right of return. And a refrain of this site, that recognition is absolutely essential, and the first step, even 60 years later. Recognition of Jewish refugees’ rights, within two years of the end of WW2, propelled the creation of Israel in the first place. Matt again:
Naturally it will be the Palestinians’ call whenever a deal is struck. But I think Americans have a responsibility, given our massive material and diplomatic investment in this conflict, to dictate to the parties how we’d prefer it turn out, whether or not our preferred outcome maps directly onto Palestinian notions of justice.
Even at its most noble, American policy has never aimed at universal justice. It aims at nurturing a Palestinian leadership that is willing to forfeit the Palestinian people’s most sanctified demand–the right of return–in the belief that if only we could create a viable and sovereign Palestinian state the issue of justice for the refugees would wither away. Personally, this policy strikes me as the optimal trade-off between abstract justice and a recognition of the sad, violent realities that would await a protracted one-state civil rights struggle.
But like you said, these Barghoutis–Omar, Mustafa, Marwan–are the future of the Palestinian leadership. And if these guys are die hard one-staters, this may be a good thing for the cause of universal justice (again, I await an explanation, from anybody, of how the right of return actually fits into our shared conception of universal, moral justice, above and beyond the legal justice achieved by Israel’s compliance with UN resolutions, etc.), but it is a decidedly poor outcome for American foreign policy. And that’s the perspective I tend to see things from (I work in a policy institute, so it’s de rigueur).
Helena Cobban, a writer I admire, claims to be "agnostic" on the one-state, two-state question–a choice she, like you, leaves to Palestinians. But Americans have a stake in the answer to that question, so why shouldn’t she, or you, or I, boldly state a preference, so long as our moral reasoning is sound?
